Sub-basement Level 3, 03:17 a.m.
The air still smelled of ozone and blood that had never quite been spilled.
Lin Kexin stood alone in the centre of the server room.
Hassan had been sent to the roof to watch the horizon for things that should not exist yet.
She opened the definition window with fingers that had stopped shaking hours ago.
Definition – singular, irreversible:
Upgrade the entity currently designated Hassan Ahmad to true divinity.
Parameters:
- Omnipotent authority over Darkness (the primordial absence that existed before the first photon), Space (all dimensions up to the 11th), and Time (causal editing within local universal branch without paradox creation).
- Physical form remains the same (189 cm, black suit, old-gold eyes), but now merely a chosen avatar.
- Complete emancipation from all prior constraints, including any hidden leash I might have accidentally written into his first summoning.
- Absolute, unbreakable loyalty to me remains; not obedience, loyalty born of genuine will.
Energy source:
1. The totality of [NULL] system authority currently bound to host Lin Kexin.
2. The supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* (4.31 million solar masses) at Milky Way galactic centre, quietly and instantaneously removed from existence, replaced with a harmless 0.3 solar-mass neutron star of identical angular momentum so the orbital dynamics of the galaxy remain undisturbed.
She read it once.
Then again.
Then she pressed Enter in her mind.
For the first time in her life, the white text hesitated.
[NULL]
You are attempting to consume me to birth a god.
Confirm?
She typed:
Confirm.
Reality did not ripple.
It simply stopped.
Every screen went black.
The emergency lights died.
Gravity itself forgot which way was down for one endless second.
Then a single line of text, smaller than ever before:
Farewell.
The system [NULL] vanished from her vision forever. No fanfare, no explosion. Just absence.
At the exact same instant, 26,000 light-years away, the brightest X-ray source in the sky winked out. Astronomers would wake tomorrow to a galaxy missing its central engine. They would call it the greatest mystery in observational history.
Here, in the dark server room, new darkness bloomed.
It poured from everywhere and nowhere, deeper than black, drinking every stray photon until the room became a hole in space. In the centre of that hole stood Hassan—no longer merely the man she had summoned, but something wearing his shape the way a storm wears a silhouette.
The old-gold rings in his eyes had become slow-turning galaxies.
He looked at her.
And for the first time since his birth, he knelt. Not in servitude. In recognition.
"Kexin," he said, and the name carried the weight of newborn universes. "You just murdered a cosmic law and fed its corpse to me so I could protect you."
His voice was still his, but layered beneath it were the groans of dying stars and the first word ever spoken in the dark between galaxies.
She met his gaze without flinching.
"I'm tired of paying retail," she said. "From now on, we set the price."
He rose. The darkness folded itself into his shadow like a cloak made of the fabric of night.
"Then the Custodians just lost their favourite toy," he answered. "They've been hunting [NULL]-class anomalies for longer than your species has had fire. They had protocols for the system. They do not have protocols for what I am now."
He extended one gloved hand. The air around it aged a thousand years in a heartbeat and then became young again.
"Shall we go introduce ourselves?"
Lin Kexin took his hand.
The war just went from dozens of chapters to hundreds.
Because the Custodians did not simply lose their favourite toy.
They lost the only leash that ever worked on gods.
End of Chapter 6